


Pyromania

by 8The_Great_Perhaps8



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Arson, Gen, third person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-20
Updated: 2015-02-20
Packaged: 2018-03-13 21:10:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3396446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8The_Great_Perhaps8/pseuds/8The_Great_Perhaps8
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They don't fight fires, they start them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pyromania

**Author's Note:**

> fair warning this story has the beta kids + beta trolls setting their houses/apartments on fire and its kinda weird  
> theres also implied character death for everyone who isnt listed

They had way too many electrical cables in their apartment, the firemen said. He was sitting on the edge of the ambulance, had a shock blanket around his shoulders, and he found that he didn’t care. He couldn’t have stopped the fire, they keep saying. It’s no one’s fault except some faulty insulation. He looks up at the roof of his apartment complex and remembers the fighting, the scratching, the weird mind games, and the filming him for that weird sex site.  
Rose had told him that fire was cleansing, and the guilt that he expected never came.  
**  
It was a freak storm, they say. She’s sitting on her blanket on the front lawn, absently reaching for Jaspers and pulling away when he isn’t there. It hit the observatory, they keep talking, and the fire just spread from there. Her mother kept a great many dangerous-and flammable-experiments in the house, and the fire devoured everything that it saw. She was lucky to get out, they say, her room was right in the way. She keeps quiet, though, and she looks appropriately upset when they tell her that her mother didn’t get out. She never gets out.  
Fire is cleansing after all, and you can’t miss someone you never loved.  
**  
No one waits with her on her island. There’s a helicopter buzzing overhead, desperately pouring water on the enormous fire. She pats Bec while she waits on the dock and prepares to flee. The mansion was always so empty, so fucking empty. Who cares about some old kook’s house on an island, she figured. She spared the generators and her robots, because she figures that’s all she needs. Grandpa paid for the airdrops through 2030, and she can hunt okay anyway. She waits on the dock with her dog and feels so, so free.  
She waits until the last spark is gone, and she laughs.  
**  
He is cold when it happens, despite his shock blankets and his hot cocoa. He is cold, despite the fact that his house is still on fire, still burning magnificently in the Washington evening. The police and the firefighters are all talking to each other, talking at him, but he can’t look away from the destruction of his home. His father was always baking. He either fell asleep on the couch or he just didn’t hear the alarm go off, and by the time that he responded, it was too late. No one asks John how he got out of the house without his dad, or maybe they do but he’s too numb to hear it.  
He knows the truth. He’s never telling anybody.  
**  
She is the only one in her home when the fire starts. It is not a slow burn, and it is not a quick flash so that she doesn’t feel anything. She feels it all, and it makes her feel alive. Her skin crackles and bursts and burns and she laughs in the agony of it all. She breathes in too much smoke and screams out the infection in her lungs. She becomes lost in the ecstasy of death as it burns, and she keeps grinning wider.  
She had asked for this to be her end.  
**  
The firefighters chuckle uncomfortably about the story. Wolves pulled him out of his house, he said, entirely too seriously. Animals always do what he says, but that thought does not escape his mouth. He refuses to go into the ambulance, and instead sits on the grass to wait. They whisper behind them, and he continues his benign mixture of hope and concern, because maybe they’ll make it out too. He lies to the firefighters, tells them that his brother and his dad are heavy sleepers, maybe they’ll come out right now. He waits for survivors, and animals gather around him. The firefighters stop laughing.  
He does have a bit of a cruel streak.  
**  
He is angry when the fire starts, he is joyous as it burns, and he is beyond depressed as it smolders and ends. It had started in the top floor of the complex, the firefighters whisper, and they don’t really understand it. They’re still in there, he says, and they don’t know who ‘they’ are, but he doesn’t care two minutes later, anyway. He tries to make a break for it twice, shouts and screams and laughs, and he’s so contradictory that almost no one knows what to do with him. He is enamored by the tongues of flame that lick the stars, and his glasses reflect orange and yellow in blue and red tints.  
Two splashes of kerosene and two matches. Fwoosh.  
**  
He is angry with them as they make him wait. He screams vulgarities and howls expletives, but they do not let him go back in the house. There are firefighters in there, they tell him, and Karkat would you please calm down. He does not calm down. He is angry and he is loud and that is all that he needs to be. The smoke tickles his nose, beckoning him towards the destruction, and he screams. He does not scream words, though they are his forté, he simply screams noise, and they mistake this for hysteria because he has lost them. He would laugh, but he must rage.  
Rage instigates impulsive and destructive decisions.  
**  
She gets out with nothing but the clothes on her back and her cat doll. The flames consume her home, and she hisses at the encroaching tendrils of flames and leaps backwards. No one lives in these woods, no one but her sister and her mother and she. The flames consume her wood cottage as she grooms herself. She hates the smell of smoke, hates what it is and what it does. She hates it, but still she does not call for help as the abhorrent scent fills the air.  
She purrs when the ashes stop smoldering.  
**  
She cries pretty tears in her pretty pajamas while the workers bustle about around her. She is the picture of perfect beauty in this pose, with her tears carefully measured and her pajamas appropriately mussed. What she sees, however, isn’t so beautiful as she. It is decrepit and ashen and horrible, just horrible, she says, when the policeman asks. She is so very upset, and she is such a pretty crier, no one goes more in-depth into her story. She had long ago mastered the power of beauty and was not eager to break her magic spell.  
Oh, well. Vampires are incinerated with the morning sun, anyway.  
**  
She does not weep as her home burns. The fire is great and it is terrible and it smells of death, but she does not see any of it and she does not weep for it. She is as impassive as a statue, and gazes upon the destruction with the critical eye of the executioner. She waves the fire forward with the same careful deliberation as a jury. The fire begins, and she watches, with the delicate decision of a supreme court justice. The policemen and the firemen arrive, and she ugly cries because adults never want to deal with an ugly crier. She sobs in the back of the ambulance as they check her over for injuries, and she wails when someone tells her that no one got out except her.  
The death penalty is legal in her state.  
**  
She waits on the curb outside her house and she screams. She had been having a run of bad luck lately, but this supports her story and she’s glad for it. Her mother had fallen asleep smoking a cigarette, she would say, and this thought makes her so happy she almost misses it when the emergency workers arrive. They carry her into the ambulance, and she hears enough to know its permanent when she intervenes.  
“Mama,” she croaks, and the paramedics exchange looks over her head. “I’m sorry,” one says, “your mother didn’t make it out of the house.”  
She chokes on the response, and they think that the sound is her tears.  
What good luck that her mother happened to be a smoker.  
**  
He waits outside of the house for the flames to die down. It’s not proper to stay indoors for too long, his father had always said. And he always did what his father asked of him. It’s very proper to do it that way, and there’s no way to do it except for the proper way. It was all done very properly. He’s nothing if not proper. The flames are devouring the edges of his property by the time the ambulances and firefighters come, and he feels almost uncomfortable when they start shouting at him. He doesn’t mind, though. So long as they act properly.  
The fire is a proper farewell.  
**  
He is not home when the fire started, he tells the police, and there’s no way for them to prove that he was. His eyes are bloodshot when they interview him, and he blames it on the tears, but he cracks up too often during the interview. The fire had been enormous, the firemen told him. It was one of the biggest they’d ever seen, and he smiles at that. It was so enormous, just for when his father got home. His father isn’t home often. He likes to do something special for his father.  
It was a great surprise.  
**  
He is from a military family, and flames are traditional in military deaths. He waits outside of the house, with his blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a cape while the tongues of flame consume the stars in the sky. He shivers and tugs at his blanket, although the fire is warm enough. The cold wind that comes off the ocean chills him to the bone, and its a constant combat between the chills of the sea and the warmth of the blaze of his home. He does not mind the combat, as it keeps him awake. He is the prince of combat and he is glad to be central.  
He has destroyed their hope.  
**  
Hers is a family of the old ones and their money comes with their age. Most of their liquid investments will be devoured by the fire, and she finds that she doesn’t mind. Money is not the important thing in life, she reminds herself, and she absentmindedly swirls the water in her beta fish’s tank. She has to take care of it, she knows. She knows better than other people do who needs taking care of. She takes care of everyone, even if no one thinks that she’s taking care of them. She’s taking care of people right now, and everything’s going great. She’s so nice for taking care of them.  
She breathes in the smoke and grins.


End file.
